Email Fetching - How It Works

If you would like to receive emails from another email address into your Iridium Mail account, you can usually setup forwarding through your email provider. As an alternative, you can setup email fetching on this device.

Once configured and enabled, the email fetching feature is used to transfer mail from an external mail server to the Iridium Mail server and ultimately to this device. It is important to understand how this happens.

1. Mail transfer from an external server to the Iridium Mail server only occurs when an Iridium Mail connection is made.

2. Mail is NOT transferred in real time. A connection to the Iridium Mail server will initiate the transfer of mail from the external server. The process is started but runs in the background while Iridium Mail continues its normal operation. Mail from the remote server can take some time to transfer and will only be available for download to your device after the process completes. Iridium Mail will wait for the remote transfer to complete (keeping your connection open) and then it will transfer that mail to your local account.

3. A more efficient method of email fetching is to set "Fetch Asynchronously" to ON.  With fetching asynchronously enabled, the fetching process is started and runs in the background, however, when the email currently on the server has been transferred, the connection is closed. Therefore, it takes a minimum of two (2) connections to retrieve the fetched mail. The first connection sends the "fetch email" request to the external server, the second connection retrieves the fetched email. There is no way of knowing how long it will take to transfer the mail from the external server to the Iridium Mail server. We recommend using the SMS Alerts feature to be notified when email is ready for download.

4. There is no limit to the number of remote email acccounts that can be configured for fetching.